


Après-Moi Le Deluge

by sophiahelix



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Hate Sex, Knives, Love/Hate, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:15:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: “It was never going to be bloodless.”
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 14
Kudos: 101
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Après-Moi Le Deluge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [carnivorousBelvedere](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carnivorousBelvedere/gifts).



> Section titles from the musical Hadestown, which retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as Persephone and Hades. Thanks to Deb for looking this over.
> 
> Happy holidays!

_keep on walkin’ and don’t look back_

She has to find out about Nico from the newspaper.

“Don’t go home” was the only thing Konstantin told her, before they let her go. Bandaged and wan, so weak she could hardly walk to the cab, with a healing hole just below her sternum that twinged sharply whenever she moved. Pain, a useful reminder of the quality of her luck.

Like Eve had in Paris, Villanelle had missed the heart.

It had been three weeks in the safehouse, maybe four, somewhere in eastern Europe. Eve lost track of time, marking the hours by shadows on the walls and the shift changes in nurses, the next silent, brusque woman who’d show up to rummage beneath her bandages and give her the good drugs. They all looked like junkies, sinewy and sunken-eyed, and they didn’t talk any more than the guards did, other than Mario who never shut up. 

The cab took her to the train station, where she stared up at the big board full of the names of places she didn’t want to go and picked one. When she got there, she picked another place. Slow and easy, taking her time, moving like a woman who knew where she was going, instead of a woman who didn’t want to be where she was coming from.

In the end, home was the only place that made sense. Not the way Konstantin meant it, but the way Eve remembered it, boring and small, houses and streets that looked the same, trading charm for safety in numbers. She got a shitty furnished apartment in a suburb of Ottawa, or maybe it’s part of the city now, rolled under a bureaucratic umbrella to make things easy for someone. It doesn’t make any difference to her. 

**MAN FOUND IN STORAGE UNIT WITH GIRLFRIEND’S BODY FINALLY RELEASED FROM CUSTODY**

Eve laughs, when she reads the story. She doesn’t mean to, because it isn’t funny at all, but that’s what her body does to her. Another betrayal, another way to put her on the side of _them_ instead of _us_ , among the forces of what the fuck ever arrayed against decent human beings.

Of course Villanelle had left him there with no phone, only Gemma, going stiff and then limp, as useless in death as she’d been in life. (That’s not fair — she was there to take Nico in when Eve had other things on her mind, like a child or a difficult puppy passed between owners.) Of course when someone finally heard him shouting for help, the police took one look at the situation and his fingerprints everywhere and booked him until it could be sorted out. Of course no one believed his claims of being targeted by a ruthless, nameless female assassin.

Of course the newspaper called Gemma his _girlfriend_.

It doesn’t matter, really, any of it, Eve is surprised to find. She should be horrified by Gemma’s death and she isn’t. She should be afraid for Nico that the police or Villanelle or somebody else she’s pissed off will come after him, and she isn’t. She should feel bad that Carolyn’s people didn’t intercede, and she doesn’t.

 _I’m going home_ , she said in Rome, but she also said _I’m like you now, I’m not afraid of anything_ and she’s not sure which one was the truth.

She stays in Ottawa. She gets a job as a cleaner. It’s soothing, finding out how messy other people really are, the things they hide. The women she works with are mostly Chinese, and if they know that she speaks more English than she lets on, they don’t care. It’s restful, in a way, this unsurveilled life, anonymous and dull, floors and toilets all day and broadcast television at night, or just the sound of quiet in her flat, lit by a single lamp. Eve usually goes to bed early.

 _I thought you were special_ , Villanelle said, right before she shot her.

Well, what had being special got her anyway. A few stamps on her passport, a dead best friend, a husband briefly wanted for murder. Sacked three times, by bosses with questionable loyalties. A great dress, some nice perfume, a lipstick with a razor inside. And knowledge: 

— the way it feels to sink a blade into someone’s skin, both the heavy heft of an axe swung in fear and the sickening give of flesh when you knife someone you almost, very nearly, loved —

And hey, a couple of great fucks, one of them even with her husband. She really ought to have thanked Villanelle for that.

Eve’s boring now. Villanelle hates boring. Nico likes it, but Nico doesn’t want her anymore, because for a while Eve lost her goddamn mind and stopped being boring, stopped being safe, stopped being anything but want and curiosity, a dark ugly hunger that’s lived in the basement all her life until she opened the door, like a fool, and turned on the light. 

Now she knows it’s there.

*****

_the River Styx was a river of stones_

She found out about Anna by accident, reading through a file. “Oh, you didn’t know?” Carolyn asked, insincerely. They were tracking the ghost by then and when Eve thought about Villanelle she tried very hard to make it something normal, something OK. The problem was that all her memories of Villanelle were fucked up and visceral, death and sex and more death, and she didn’t even know where Anna fit in. Villanelle hadn’t fired the gun, but she was just as responsible for that death as for everything else.

(Villanelle had killed Anna’s husband, but she didn’t kill Nico. Eve doesn’t know what that means, except maybe Villanelle can learn, can change, and she doesn’t know if that gives her hope or scares her even more.)

How to live, in the bombshell crater of a life. Some days it feels like everything is marked by what it’s not; a host of memories, outlines, half-forgotten things always in a crowd around her. Her bed is hard and her clothes are cheap and her life is dull and ugly and Eve doesn’t mind, because she gave up the right to care, to demand or protest. She’s a shade, a shadow. 

A ghost.

*****

_wait for me_

In her dreams, Villanelle comes and she comes and she comes. Undulating like a kris knife, a figure seen through wavy glass. Never turn but she’s there, never wake but with the cold certainty of her face on the pillow, gasping.

_I really liked you_

In black and in scarlet, blood hue, vital wound. Everything’s the color of death when it’s worn by Villanelle. Blade sharp and Eve would have used her, yes, like a knife or an axe, carving chunks from a safe and stolid life, stabbing into its belly and leaving holes behind. 

She touches herself, now, when she thinks of Villanelle. She never let herself before. Not because of Nico, or maybe so but for the wrong reasons. It would have been jarring, all that slow heavy tenderness when what she really wanted was cruelty, a blade hidden in a gift, fear like a brand at her throat. To feel alive, the pulsing electric thread of it that could be snapped, or cut by a loving hand.

(She got all that, once, from him. It was too much, _she_ was too much, and part of her will never forgive him for running from the weight of it, from the glimpse of his own shadow.)

When Eve slips her fingers, deliberate, beneath the waistband of her underwear, her mind is already laying the way before her. Red lips and dark curves, the poetry of knives, a thumb pressing deep. Powerful hands and sharp teeth, laughter, a tug at her hair. Surrender to strength, body tense, legs spread wide. A voice in her ear, a message, a whisper.

Villanelle will come for her, she knows.

Night by night Eve lies in her hard and narrow bed and waits. To be unsought is unthinkable. To be wiped from this world like so much chalk dust, a brief life without matter. Once she held roses in her hands, onions, books, soft linens, a lover’s face. Once she sang, drank, smiled, captured in photographs. Once someone cared enough to try to keep her.

On her knees, scrubbing, she schools her mind blank, playing the ghost she’s become. In bed, turning the world into fantastic colors, gasping into the crook of her arm, she thinks of everything she’s wanted, everything she’s had, everything she could be. She’s faced the fire and she’s hungry for it again, the searing bite of life, the consuming heat, the ecstasy of danger. 

Things will be better, she thinks, when she’s not alone.

*****

_our lady of the underground_

Eve couldn’t say, exactly, how she reads the signs. It was her job once to know. Evidence and instinct, experience and fact, mingling to birth knowledge. She was good at it, and she still is.

Now she’s used all her skill to divine what’s coming, the passage through the world of a single soul. A tingle at the back of her neck, choosing groceries, of being watched. Her mailbox, full of junk, the door left slightly ajar. On the doorstep of her next job site, an apple, smooth and red.

Villanelle is stealthy, but she was never very subtle.

Will it be tonight? Eve turns in her bed, half-dreaming. No, awake — she is forever coming more conscious, shedding layers of sleep and illusion, reality sharpening. With Villanelle, it’s always been like stepping out of a painting, leaving behind the flat, constrained chessboard world. She’s moved in new directions — chasing Villanelle, standing by her side, turning away — until up and down and black and white are meaningless, concepts for a shed self. Now they oppose without being opposites, their differences what make them the same. 

_You don’t know what love is_ , Eve said, and she worries all the time that she wasn’t talking to Villanelle at all.

For a while, after, she clung to _right_. Healing slowly in that close, shadowy room, drifting through pain and boredom and isolation, she thought of how it felt when she knew her great mistake. Seeing her life, her real life, sensible and bright and achingly desirable, suspended just behind a pane of glass. This was wrong, and that was right, and to mend the error all she had to do was open the window and walk through it to the light.

But here in the afterlife it all means nothing. _Right_ was Nico, rainy London summers and takeaway dinners and cold feet in bed and morning breath kisses and a flat future laid out on cast-iron rails. She was a fool, to think she could have had all that back, just by saying _I’m sorry_ like a little girl. She doesn’t even know who she’d be apologizing to.

She doesn’t sleep, the next night. She sits up smoking instead, a habit she’s returned to like a water creature sliding into a river, as natural as the next breath after a sigh. It won’t be tonight. Villanelle will keep her waiting just a little too long, until her own skin feels too tight, until she jumps at shadows and sounds, until Eve is living at the frayed edge exactly like she is. Playing her, delicate and sure. It won’t be tonight.

Eve goes to bed at four in the morning, and wakes up ten minutes later when Villanelle gets in next to her.

“Hi, baby,” Villanelle says, her low voice rough and liquid, a thumbnail snagging on silk. “Did you miss me?”

Every nerve flares to life at her touch, her words. Her _smell_ , metallic and sickly-sweet, richness covering something dank beneath. In the darkness Eve can only see the shine of her eyes, the edge of her teeth, bared in a pleased and deadly smile. 

Eve kisses it. 

There’s a knife, hidden in the depths of her pillow. To draw it now would be to warp this moment around the blade, to make the danger something outside themselves. She feels the softness in Villanelle, belly and breasts, and the lethal hardness beneath, like something made of steel. She cradles Villanelle’s head as they kiss and imagines the clockwork within, the strange thoughts, misfiring lightning coming to the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons. _You’re not real_ , she thinks. 

But she sinks deeper into the slick pull of Villanelle’s mouth and for a moment, they’re only human, sharing this heat on a winter’s night.

Villanelle showed her teeth and Eve does too, always withdrawing. Her teeth scrape over Villanelle’s plump lower lip, testing it like fruit. It draws a gasp from Villanelle, her first, and Eve feels the way her body tenses, spine compressed, ready for the fight. That’s not what Eve is doing, though, and she only moves on, seeking the ripe places of Villanelle’s body.

She can’t stop _thinking_. It’s never been like with that Villanelle, she’s only ever been a collection of impulses when they’re together, but as the power builds she’s the one running on cruel clockwork. Her fingers, precise and short-nailed, traverse curves and bone, seeking to know what she’s only guessed at before.

Villanelle lets her, and Eve can tell she’s waiting, watching. Looking for the hidden catch, the spring, the moment things change. Eve’s kissing the damp hollow beneath her jaw, and Villanelle laughs, once, breathless, with something nervous in it. Off balance, en garde.

“This is what you thought you’d get, isn’t it,” Eve murmurs, and bites at the tendon of her neck.

“What,” Villanelle asks, sharp.

“Me,” Eve says. She reaches under Villanelle’s tank top, feeling for the knot of scars beneath her heart, and presses, hard. “Me.”

Villanelle scratches Eve’s shoulder, claws digging in. For a moment the balance almost shifts, the dizzy spell breaking and the killing machine unleashed, but Villanelle only shakes her head against the pillow. “I always had you.”

Eve pushes then, rolling her onto her back, sitting astride her hips. Villanelle stretches, languorous, confident in her own strength, but there’s an uncertain hitch in the roll of her shoulders. It makes Eve smile, and then she leans in, close, until they’re sharing breath. “You don’t have shit.”

She knows it could happen fast. Villanelle could break her neck, put a knife in her throat, tear Eve apart with her bare hands. But she didn’t stay to watch Eve’s death the last time, and she wouldn’t be here tonight, if murder was on her mind. She wants something else. 

They’re kissing again, rough, and Eve rocks down, knees spread, until the bones of their hips grind together. Pushes up Villanelle’s tank top to find her bare beneath, breasts resting heavy and nipples tight, and sudden feeling pierces her at that soft weight in her hands, the way Villanelle arches into her touch. Fear and tenderness, a sick fascination like looking at a wound, to see her vulnerable like that. Eve ducks her head lower and makes the moment hard again, using her teeth, focusing on Villanelle’s curses instead of the flesh beneath her mouth.

Villanelle wanted her down in the darkness. It’s all Eve has been able to think of, ever since. She tried to play the hero and Villanelle warped it at every turn, always in control. Eve made brutal, messy death with her hands and a pure heart and even that was taken from her, turned to another chapter of their sick game. There was never a right way to win, except to walk away.

And Villanelle didn’t let her. 

Tonight, Villanelle is waiting for violence from her again. Maybe she wants it, something ugly she can return in kind, laughing, or maybe some part of her longs for punishment and absolution, a balanced slate. Eve won’t give her either. She feels the tension spike in Villanelle as she moves lower, hooked thumbs dragging clothes down her body, leaning in. How much she wants a blow from Eve, a bite, a reason to retaliate.

Once Eve would have done this with love, and now she does it with hate, and it’s the same either way. Hot and strange and easy, so easy, to make Villanelle human, animal, undone. 

“Eve,” she cries out, false at first, a mockery, and then for real.

She’s a storm beneath Eve’s mouth and hands, wet and straining, powerful thighs and impossible softness between, and she pulls Eve’s hair the whole time, the heedless selfish clutch of a child. Eve does her work well, fingers pushing deep, and thinks, _this is what she feels like inside_.

The storm passes, loud and sharp, and then Villanelle’s loose, limp, breathing heavy. Eve wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and crawls up the bed, reaching for the knife in the pillow. When she turns back Villanelle is watching her, a smile on her face.

It’s a different smile this time. Knowing but relieved, like this is what she expected all along. Like Eve with a knife in her hand is destiny, and Villanelle looks up at her with such longing eyes for what happens next.

Eve draws the point of the knife, slowly, down Villanelle’s bare chest. Circles the place where she hurt her before, then crosses it, marking it, pressing almost but not quite hard enough to draw blood. Pauses. Thinks. Waits.

She looks Villanelle in the eye and tosses the knife across the room, clattering on the floor and disappearing into darkness.

“Get out,” Eve says. 

Villanelle’s breath catches, her chest rising without fall. She’s mostly dressed still, clothes pulled askew, and her hair is loose, tangled around her face. She licks her lips, lashes fluttering, face slack as though she’s waiting to put herself back on again, like a discarded dress. She exhales. 

Eve leans closer, empty-handed. There’s nothing left, no life to salvage, no pride to armor herself with, no questions between them but this. Villanelle is breathing hard now, live and loud, and she’s never looked so young, so old, so present. They’re both wide awake now, here in the dark.

Villanelle reaches up and takes Eve’s face in her hand. Death is in her touch, and blood blooms beneath it now, heat rising to the surface. Villanelle always has the last word.

Neither of them says anything but breath, breath, breath.


End file.
